Ninja (29 page)

The next day Suzuki was back, and saw the fishing boat moored in the lee of Browse Island, some 160 kilometers offshore and 320 kilometers northeast of their destination, with the landing party relaxing on the sandy beach, for movement during the day would have been fatal. Seeing that there was nothing more to be done, Suzuki headed home for the last time. That night the boat completed its journey and entered King Sound. By dawn, it was moored inshore, its superstructure well camouflaged, and the landing party was ashore, searching for the rumored base.

They found absolutely nothing. There was no base. They shot some film to prove it, then made for home. That was the extent of the Nakano School's covert operation in Australia, and the only time that Japanese troops actually landed there.

Back home, the Nakano School faced a stark new reality. Japan's advance had stalled, then been reversed. By late 1943, Guadalcanal, lynchpin of the South Pacific, was lost. New Guinea, the base from which Japan had planned to invade Australia, was held by a small group of irregulars, the Eighteenth Army's Special Volunteer Corps, led by Nakano-trained Lieutenant Saito Shunji. He and two other Nakano men commanded three squads each, 135 men in all, many of them aborigines from the mountains and jungles of Taiwan, famous for their stamina and hunting abilities. In September 1943, carrying explosives, hand grenades, and incendiaries, they made a night attack on an Australian camp, seizing several machine guns and five thousand rounds of ammunition, and killing some sixty and wounding eighty without a single loss. Later assaults on other villages and camps killed three hundred, again without loss.

When briefed on the results, military intelligence drew the obvious conclusion. Intelligence and subversion were no longer enough. The empire needed to focus on unconventional warfare. Since no one could contemplate defeat, it seemed clear that Japan would be at war for a long, long time, and to maintain a foothold in its fading empire it needed commandos not only to undertake guerrilla actions but also to survive behind enemy lines, gathering intelligence, until the moment came when they could help in reconquest.

The result was the opening of Nakano's new commando training center at Futamata (today part of Tenryu, some two hundred kilometers southwest of Tokyo). Here, in an intense three months, students were taught reconnaissance, infiltration, demolition, propaganda, mapmaking, the military government of occupied territories, and guerrilla fighting techniques, keeping fit with kendo and karate. Much of the training was similar to ninja techniques, and some of it derived directly from them, such as the practice of walking close up against a wall to avoid casting a shadow. One of those who taught there was Fujita Seiko, a shadowy figure who claimed to be the last of the ninjas—of which there have been quite a few, as we will see—and specifically the last of the K
o
ga ninjas, no less.

One of the 220 at the opening ceremony on September 1, 1944, was Second Lieutenant Onoda Hiroo, later to become Nakano's most famous graduate. He had worked in China, spoke Chinese, and had then served in China as a soldier, perfect background for commando training. He was surprised by what followed:

It was certainly very different from the officers' training school. Military forms and procedures were observed, but without excessive emphasis on regulations. On the contrary, the instructors kept stressing to us that in our new role as commando trainees, we should learn that so long as we kept the military spirit and remained determined to serve our country, the regulations were of little importance. . . . They urged us to express our opinions concerning the quality of the instruction and to make complaints if we felt like it. We had four hours of training in the morning and four in the afternoon. Classes lasted two hours each, with fifteen-minute breaks in mid-morning and mid-afternoon. When the time for a break came, everyone piled out of the classroom windows into the yard to have a smoke. There were 230 of us, packed like sardines into one small barracks, and the break was not long enough for all of us to leave and return in orderly fashion through the door. At officers' training school, if anyone had dared leave by the window, the punishment would have been swift and severe. At Futamata it was routine.

In an unimposing collection of wooden buildings, half a dozen expert instructors, all with international experience in diplomatic missions, stressed not only the need for individual initiative and a willingness to develop critical views but also something totally opposed to the samurai tradition of courting or choosing an honorable death rather than face the humiliation of defeat. That tradition was still alive, not in the expectation that defeated soldiers would commit suicide by cutting their bellies, but in other ways. Officers returning from the defeat by Russian and Mongolian troops in eastern Mongolia in 1939 were presented with pistols. In Mercado's words, “Left alone with the weapon, the repatriated officers did what was expected by committing suicide to expiate their ‘shame.'” Later, when the war turned against Japan, soldiers would choose a final suicidal charge rather than surrender. The tradition would, in October 1944, find renewed expression in the suicide bombings of the kamikaze pilots. But none of these was the Nakano way, which derived directly from the ninja tradition: first and foremost the mission, only to be fulfilled by staying alive.

At the end of his three-month training, Onoda and his fellow trainees were deployed to where Japan's next and perhaps final battles would be fought: on home ground in the south, in Okinawa, Tokyo, and the far north, and overseas in Vietnam, Indonesia, Burma, Taiwan, Korea, and the Philippines, which was where Onoda and twenty others were to go.

By 1944, Japanese authority in the Philippines was facing widespread resistance. The Japanese, welcomed as liberators by many in 1942, had squandered all goodwill by their arrogance and brutality. This was not a liberation but an occupation. Often, soldiers slapped local men in the street for not bowing to them. They shot those suspected of being sympathetic to the United States, raped, and stole. Mercado quotes one Futamata/Nakano commando's rueful assessment: The Spanish had brought Christianity in their three-hundred-year-rule, the Americans had brought roads, cars, and movies in their fifty years, but all the Japanese had done in their two years was take. As a result, American guerrillas, preparing the ground for the U.S. return, proved very effective but inspired ever more brutal responses from the Japanese military police. Into this stew of regular, guerrilla, and covert operations came some Nakano graduates, twenty-four of them by September 1944, even as Japanese losses in the Pacific mounted. In October the navy lost four carriers and the super-battleship
Musashi.
Kamikaze pilots made the fight more brutal, fearful, and bitter but would not restore Japan's fortunes. Japan lost airfield after airfield and mounted daring, often suicidal raids to retake some of them, crash-landing transport planes wheels up, firing machine guns and dropping bombs from parachutes, bayoneting sleeping Americans, all to no avail. Next would come the American invasion of Mindoro, then Luzon, the Philippines' main island. Onoda and his fellow graduates were supposed to do whatever they could to disrupt the advance. In all, there were ninety-eight shadow warriors in the Philippines, of whom a third survived the war.

On December 17, Onoda and twenty-one others from Nakano flew into Clark Airfield on Luzon and were taken to Manila. Five then traveled on to divisional headquarters in Lipa, an overnight drive away, with Major Taniguchi Yoshimi, boss of covert operations, who had both trained and taught at Nakano. He briefed the five men. Four were to lead groups on the islands of Luzon and Mindoro, while Onoda was told he was to lead a garrison in guerrilla warfare on Lubang, fifty kilometers southwest of Luzon. This was the first he had heard of Lubang. Only twenty-five kilometers long, it was dominated by a jungly spine of mountains and had an airfield and pier, which Onoda was to destroy to slow the American invasion of Luzon.

In the presence of a visiting lieutenant general, Onoda was also briefed by his division commander, Lieutenant General Yokoyama, who reemphasized one of Nakano's main lessons:

With his eyes directly on me, he said, “You are absolutely forbidden to die by your own hand. It may take three years, it may take five, but whatever happens, we'll come back for you. Until then, so long as you have one soldier, you are to continue to lead him. You may have to live on coconuts. If that is the case, live on coconuts! Under no circumstances are you to give up your life voluntarily.” A small man with a pleasant face, the commander gave me this order in a quiet voice. He sounded like a father talking to a child. . . . [In another version of the same occasion, it is the lieutenant general, Chief of Staff Muto Akira, who delivers the pep talk, but with the same message: “Let me repeat, suicidal
banzai
charges are absolutely forbidden.”] I vowed to myself that I would carry out my orders. Here I was, only an apprentice officer, receiving my orders directly from a division commander! That could not happen very often, and I was doubly impressed by the responsibility I bore. I said to myself, “I'll do it! Even if I don't have coconuts, even if I have to eat grass and weeds, I'll do it!”

One of his comrades, Yamamoto Shigeichi, born in the same prefecture and also a graduate of Futamata, was told he would be leading fifty men in an attack to retake the airfield at San Jose. He said he expected to die soon. He nearly did, because his group was torn apart during the assault. But he survived, vanished into the jungle, and reemerged eleven years later, in 1956, as a sort of curtain-raiser to Onoda's much more extended experience.

As Onoda prepared to disappear into the jungles of Lubang, his comrades back home were preparing for the ultimate victory-or-death battle, a sort of mass, ninja-style Armageddon. The army was building a massive underground shelter for the emperor in Matsushiro, in the mountains of Nagano (nothing to do with Na
k
ano) Prefecture, a natural fortress in central Japan that would be the heart of the empire's last stand. Industries, too, were shifting into the area. Mitsubishi had two entire cities ready for the construction of its Zero fighters and other weapons. In total, some six hundred other factories had set up in Nagano by the summer of 1945.

All would be defended to the end by shadow warriors coordinated by the Nakano School. Now that the Philippines was lost, the next line of defense would be Okinawa and the other Ry
u
ky
u
islands that led, like stepping-stones, northward to Japan's heartland. In the Philippines the army had learned that to meet the invaders on the beaches or in open combat was not merely suicidal, it was futile. In Okinawa there was no hope for victory over a vastly superior force, the greatest armada in history. The only aim could be to make the price too high for the enemy to pay, with suicide boats, kamikaze planes, and troops dug into the mountains, exacting losses that would force the Allies to negotiate, and thus spare Japan the humiliation of unconditional surrender.

On every one of the myriad small islands, the military posted lone shadow warriors who were supposed to organize locals to resist. Eleven were from the Nakano School, and in the guise of teachers. One of them, Sergeant Sakai Kiyoshi, arrived on Japan's most southerly point, a coral island named Hateruma, with a large orange crate containing his uniform, swords, pistols, hand grenades, explosives, and even one of those pens designed to release bacteria into the water supply if the Americans landed. After school, he taught martial arts, exhorted his students not to fear death, giving hand grenades to young girls with the order to use them on themselves if capture seemed imminent.

As it happened, lone individuals would play hardly any role and commando units only a small one in a battle that was the most deadly and costly of the war. In three months—twice as long as planned—Japan's so-called “typhoon of steel” led to the death of some 100,000 Japanese soldiers and 120,000 civilians. Some 1,500 kamikaze attacks sank more than 30 U.S. ships and damaged 400, to no avail. In mid-June, Okinawa was lost, and the Nakano men could begin their real missions—except that it was too late. On Hateruma, Sakai managed to evacuate his charges to a neighboring island, where many died of malaria. On Okinawa itself, Murakami Haruo, commanding the Third Raiding Unit, planned to use his local Okinawan auxiliaries as terrorists, posing as refugees until they received the order to attack. No order came: The United States dropped its two atomic bombs, Japan surrendered, and Murakami led his commandos into captivity. In the far north of the Ry
u
ky
u
s, where islanders were angry at their leaders for taking them into war in the first place, they denounced their “teacher” to U.S. soldiers.

The next line of retreat—the site for yet another “final battle”—was Ky
u
sh
u
, the southernmost of the four islands that make up the Japanese heartland. This would be even tougher for the Americans to take, and might, if it was too costly, force a negotiated settlement. The plan was to have coastal defense units sacrifice themselves by delaying the invaders on the beaches, and then stopping them in the forested hills of the interior, where fortifications lay far beyond the guns of the U.S. warships. Douglas MacArthur's assault would throw 350,000 men onto the beaches, but they would contend with 2,000 suicide planes, 1,100 conventional aircraft, and 700,000 troops. In this, potentially the greatest invasion in history, the Americans might lose 250,000.

Then, given victory of sorts, there would be the unconventional forces, the guerrillas, trained by some one hundred Nakano men, intelligence people from Manchukuo, China, Southeast Asia. The prime mission was to teach guerrilla warfare to civilians—attacking airborne troops, setting ambushes, conducting night raids, sabotaging—a task undertaken by a group of shadow warriors known as the Kirishima Unit, named after a local shrine and a mountain range. By the late summer, they had trained about five thousand soldiers and ten thousand veterans and civilians. These were the latter-day ninjas who would pick off Americans floating down on parachutes or threading their way in single file through paddy fields.